OpenCurious
OpenCurious Directory · Updated 2026-05-30

Physical AI
Companies, mapped.

A curated, regularly updated directory of the companies building Physical AI — artificial intelligence that perceives, reasons about, and acts in the real world through robots, vehicles, and machines. Founders, funding, products and headquarters, all in one place.

28
companies tracked
6
categories
2026
data refreshed
The primer

What is Physical AI?

Physical AI (also called embodied AI) is artificial intelligence that perceives, reasons about, and acts in the real, physical world through robots, vehicles, and machines. Unlike software-only AI such as chatbots and image generators, physical AI must handle perception, dexterity, balance, and real-time control under the laws of physics — and is judged by whether a task is actually completed in the environment.

The field spans humanoid robots, robot foundation models and vision-language-action (VLA) systems, autonomous vehicles, warehouse and industrial automation, and the simulation and compute infrastructure that powers them. It is widely regarded as the next major frontier after generative AI.

Categories

Humanoid Robots

10 companies · Figure AI, Tesla (Optimus), 1X Technologies…

Robot Foundation Models

6 companies · Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, World Labs…

Autonomous Vehicles

3 companies · Waymo, Wayve, Nuro

Industrial & Warehouse

5 companies · Dexterity AI, Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), Bright Machines…

Legged & Mobile Robots

2 companies · ANYbotics, Ghost Robotics

Infrastructure & Platforms

2 companies · Nvidia (Physical AI), Hugging Face (LeRobot)

Browse all companies

Search and filter by category. 28 companies, continuously updated.

28 of 28 companies

  • Figure AI

    Humanoid Robots

    General-purpose humanoid robots for the workforce.

    Figure builds autonomous general-purpose humanoid robots designed to perform manual labor in manufacturing, logistics, and the home. Its Helix vision-language-action (VLA) model lets the robots see, reason, and act from natural-language instructions. Its BotQ factory, opened in 2025, is built to produce up to 12,000 humanoids per year, with a stated goal of 100,000 robots over four years.

    Founded
    2022
    HQ
    Sunnyvale, California, USA
    Founders
    Brett Adcock
    Products
    Figure 01, Figure 02, Figure 03, Helix (VLA model), BotQ (factory)
    Funding
    Raised $1B+ in a Series C (Sept 2025) at a $39B post-money valuation — roughly 15x its prior round — bringing total funding above $1.75B. Investors include Parkway Venture Capital (lead), Brookfield, Nvidia, Intel Capital, LG, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and T-Mobile Ventures. Partners include BMW.

  • Tesla (Optimus)

    Humanoid Robots

    Optimus — a humanoid robot built on Tesla's autonomy stack.

    Tesla's Optimus (Tesla Bot) is a general-purpose humanoid robot that reuses the company's vehicle AI, batteries, and actuators. Tesla aims to deploy Optimus in its own factories first, then sell it broadly, positioning it as a mass-manufactured labor platform. Its Gen 3 (V3) design is being revealed in 2026, with Fremont production lines being converted to humanoid manufacturing and a long-term target of up to 1 million units per year.

    Founded
    2021 (program announced)
    HQ
    Austin, Texas, USA
    Founders
    Elon Musk (Tesla)
    Products
    Optimus Gen 1, Optimus Gen 2, Optimus Gen 3 (in development)
    Funding
    Self-funded within Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA); Tesla committed ~$20B in 2026 capex partly to scale Optimus. A few hundred units were built by mid-2025, below initial targets.

  • 1X Technologies

    Humanoid Robots

    Safe, soft-actuated humanoids for the home.

    1X (formerly Halodi Robotics) develops humanoid robots designed to work safely alongside people. Its NEO home humanoid opened consumer pre-orders in late 2025 at $20,000 (or a $499/month subscription), with US deliveries beginning in 2026; early tasks rely partly on remote human teleoperation to gather data and improve autonomy. EVE is an earlier wheeled android. 1X emphasizes tendon-driven, low-impedance actuation for human safety and is backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund.

    Founded
    2014
    HQ
    Moss, Norway & Sunnyvale, California, USA
    Founders
    Bernt Børnich
    Products
    NEO (home humanoid), EVE
    Funding
    Raised $130M+ in venture funding, including a ~$100M Series B (2024); investors include EQT Ventures, Tiger Global, and the OpenAI Startup Fund.

  • Agility Robotics

    Humanoid Robots

    Digit — a bipedal robot for logistics work.

    Agility Robotics builds Digit, a human-centric bipedal robot designed to move totes and bins in warehouses and distribution centers. The company operates RoboFab, described as a purpose-built humanoid robot factory, and has run commercial deployments with logistics operators.

    Founded
    2015
    HQ
    Salem & Corvallis, Oregon, USA
    Founders
    Damion Shelton, Jonathan Hurst
    Products
    Digit, RoboFab (factory)
    Funding
    Raised a ~$400M Series C (2025) at a reported ~$1.75–2.1B valuation, bringing total funding to ~$641M. Investors include WP Global Partners (lead), SoftBank, DCVC, Playground Global, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, NVentures (Nvidia), and Sony Innovation Fund.

  • Apptronik

    Humanoid Robots

    Apollo — a commercial humanoid for industrial work.

    Apptronik, spun out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at UT Austin, builds Apollo, a general-purpose humanoid for manufacturing and logistics. The company has partnered with Google DeepMind on robot intelligence and with Mercedes-Benz on factory deployments.

    Founded
    2016
    HQ
    Austin, Texas, USA
    Founders
    Jeff Cardenas, Nick Paine
    Products
    Apollo
    Funding
    Raised a $415M Series A (Feb 2025) co-led by B Capital and Google, plus a $520M extension (Feb 2026) at a ~$5B valuation — a ~$935M Series A and nearly $1B in total funding. Backers include Mercedes-Benz, Peak6, AT&T Ventures, and John Deere.

  • Sanctuary AI

    Humanoid Robots

    Phoenix — humanoids with human-like dexterity.

    Sanctuary AI develops Phoenix, a humanoid robot, and Carbon, an AI control system intended to give robots human-like reasoning and dexterous hands. The company focuses on teleoperation-to-autonomy data pipelines for general-purpose work.

    Founded
    2018
    HQ
    Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
    Founders
    Geordie Rose, Suzanne Gildert
    Products
    Phoenix, Carbon (control system)
    Funding
    Backed by investors including Bell and the Government of Canada SIF program.

  • Boston Dynamics

    Humanoid Robots

    Atlas, Spot & Stretch — pioneers of dynamic robotics.

    A robotics pioneer (now owned by Hyundai), Boston Dynamics builds the all-electric Atlas humanoid, the Spot quadruped, and the Stretch warehouse robot. It unveiled the production version of the electric Atlas at CES 2026 and is partnering with Google DeepMind to integrate foundation models; demos show Atlas using reinforcement learning to lift 100-pound loads. Hyundai plans to deploy Atlas fleets across US plants, with a factory targeting ~30,000 units per year by 2028.

    Founded
    1992
    HQ
    Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
    Founders
    Marc Raibert
    Products
    Atlas (electric), Spot, Stretch
    Funding
    Acquired by Hyundai Motor Group (2021); backed by Hyundai's multi-billion-dollar US robotics and manufacturing investment.

  • Unitree Robotics

    Humanoid Robots

    Low-cost humanoids and quadrupeds at scale.

    Unitree is a Chinese robotics maker known for aggressively priced quadrupeds and the G1 and H1 humanoid robots. Its low price points have made advanced legged robots accessible to researchers and developers worldwide.

    Founded
    2016
    HQ
    Hangzhou, China
    Founders
    Wang Xingxing
    Products
    G1, H1, Go2 (quadruped), B2 (quadruped)
    Funding
    Backed by investors including Tencent and reported pre-IPO interest.

  • Fourier Intelligence

    Humanoid Robots

    GR-series humanoids and rehabilitation robotics.

    Fourier began in rehabilitation robotics and expanded into general-purpose humanoids with its GR-1 and GR-2 robots, targeting healthcare, research, and service applications.

    Founded
    2015
    HQ
    Shanghai, China
    Founders
    Alex Gu
    Products
    GR-1, GR-2, Rehabilitation systems

  • UBTech Robotics

    Humanoid Robots

    Walker — humanoids for industry and service.

    UBTech is a publicly listed Chinese robotics company building the Walker humanoid line for industrial and consumer service roles, alongside education and consumer robots.

    Founded
    2012
    HQ
    Shenzhen, China
    Founders
    James Zhou
    Products
    Walker S, Walker X
    Funding
    Publicly listed (HKEX: 9880).

  • Physical Intelligence

    Robot Foundation Models

    Foundation models that bring general intelligence to robots.

    Physical Intelligence (π) is building a single general-purpose AI model to control any robot for any task. Its π (pi) vision-language-action models — from π0 (pi-zero) through π0.6 — are trained across diverse robots and tasks and refined with real-world reinforcement learning to fold laundry, package products, and make coffee, aiming to be a foundation model for physical actions much like LLMs are for text.

    Founded
    2024
    HQ
    San Francisco, California, USA
    Founders
    Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter, Lachy Groom
    Products
    π0 (pi-zero), π0.5, π0.6
    Funding
    Raised a $70M seed (2024), a $400M Series A (Nov 2024) at a $2.4B valuation, and a $600M Series B (Nov 2025, led by CapitalG) at a $5.6B valuation — ~$1.07B total. Investors include Jeff Bezos, OpenAI, Thrive, Lux, and Bond.

  • Skild AI

    Robot Foundation Models

    A general-purpose 'brain' for robots.

    Skild AI, founded by Carnegie Mellon professors, is building Skild Brain — which it describes as an 'omni-bodied' robot foundation model that can control any robot (quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, mobile manipulators) without prior knowledge of its exact body form, generalizing across tasks and environments from manipulation to locomotion.

    Founded
    2023
    HQ
    Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
    Founders
    Deepak Pathak, Abhinav Gupta
    Products
    Skild Brain
    Funding
    Raised a $135M Series B (2025) at a $4.5B valuation, then a $1.4B Series C (Jan 2026) led by SoftBank at a $14B+ valuation. Other investors include Nvidia, Macquarie, Lightspeed, and Coatue.

  • World Labs

    Robot Foundation Models

    Large World Models for spatial intelligence.

    Founded by 'godmother of AI' Fei-Fei Li, World Labs builds Large World Models (LWMs) that understand and generate 3D physical worlds. Its first commercial product, Marble (launched 2025), generates explorable 3D virtual worlds from a text or image prompt. Spatial intelligence is a foundational capability for embodied AI, robotics, and simulation.

    Founded
    2024
    HQ
    San Francisco, California, USA
    Founders
    Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, Ben Mildenhall
    Products
    Marble (3D world model), Large World Models (spatial intelligence)
    Funding
    Emerged from stealth with $230M (2024), then raised ~$1B (2026). Investors include Nvidia, AMD, a16z, NEA, Autodesk, and Fidelity.

  • Covariant

    Robot Foundation Models

    RFM-1 — a foundation model for robotic manipulation.

    Covariant pioneered AI-driven robotic picking for warehouses and introduced RFM-1, a robotics foundation model trained on large volumes of real-world manipulation data. In 2024, much of its founding team joined Amazon in a licensing arrangement.

    Founded
    2017
    HQ
    Emeryville, California, USA
    Founders
    Pieter Abbeel, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan, Tianhao Zhang
    Products
    RFM-1, Covariant Brain
    Funding
    Raised $200M+; key leadership joined Amazon in 2024.

  • Field AI

    Robot Foundation Models

    Field Foundation Models for robots in the wild.

    Field AI develops Field Foundation Models (FFMs) that let robots operate autonomously in complex, GPS-denied, unstructured environments such as construction sites, mines, and industrial plants — without prior maps.

    Founded
    2023
    HQ
    Mission Viejo, California, USA
    Founders
    Ali Agha
    Products
    Field Foundation Models (FFMs)
    Funding
    Raised ~$405M across two rounds ($91M in late 2024 and $314M in Aug 2025) at a $2B valuation. Investors include Nvidia (NVentures), Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates' Gates Frontier, Khosla Ventures, Intel Capital, Temasek, and Samsung.

  • Generalist AI

    Robot Foundation Models

    Foundation models for general-purpose robots.

    Generalist AI is building large-scale foundation models to give robots broad, general-purpose dexterity and reasoning, with a focus on scaling real-world robot learning data.

    Founded
    2024
    HQ
    San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
    Founders
    Pete Florence, Andy Zeng
    Products
    Generalist robot foundation models
    Funding
    Backed by leading AI and robotics investors.

  • Waymo

    Autonomous Vehicles

    Fully autonomous ride-hailing at scale.

    Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, operates one of the world's leading fully driverless robotaxi services, with paid public rides across multiple US cities. Its Waymo Driver combines lidar, radar, cameras, and deep learning for full self-driving.

    Founded
    2009 (as the Google Self-Driving Car Project)
    HQ
    Mountain View, California, USA
    Founders
    Google / Alphabet
    Products
    Waymo One (robotaxi), Waymo Driver
    Funding
    Raised multi-billion-dollar external rounds; subsidiary of Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL).

  • Wayve

    Autonomous Vehicles

    Embodied AI for end-to-end autonomous driving.

    Wayve pioneers 'AV2.0' — an end-to-end, learning-based approach to self-driving that uses a single neural network and embodied AI rather than hand-coded rules and HD maps. It has driven zero-shot (without city-specific fine-tuning) in 500+ cities across Europe, North America, and Japan, and powers upcoming Uber robotaxi trials starting in London in 2026.

    Founded
    2017
    HQ
    London, United Kingdom
    Founders
    Alex Kendall, Amar Shah
    Products
    Wayve AI Driver, GAIA (driving world model)
    Funding
    Raised a ~$1.05B Series C (2024, led by SoftBank) and a $1.2B Series D (Feb 2026) at an $8.6B valuation. Investors include Nvidia, Uber, Microsoft, SoftBank, and automakers Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis.

  • Nuro

    Autonomous Vehicles

    Autonomous delivery and a licensable AI driver.

    Nuro builds autonomous vehicles for local goods delivery and licenses the Nuro Driver — its full self-driving system — to automakers and mobility partners.

    Founded
    2016
    HQ
    Mountain View, California, USA
    Founders
    Dave Ferguson, Jiajun Zhu
    Products
    Nuro Driver, Autonomous delivery vehicles
    Funding
    Raised a reported $2B+ across rounds; investors include SoftBank and T. Rowe Price.

  • Dexterity AI

    Industrial & Warehouse

    AI-powered robots for warehouses and logistics.

    Dexterity builds full-stack AI robots that pick, pack, palletize, and load goods in warehouses and parcel networks for customers including FedEx and UPS. Its dual-arm 'superhumanoid' Mech has a ~5.4 m working envelope and can lift up to ~60 kg (132 lb), combining force-aware manipulation with physical AI models.

    Founded
    2017
    HQ
    Palo Alto, California, USA
    Founders
    Samuel Zapolsky
    Products
    Mech (superhumanoid), Palletization & induction systems
    Funding
    Raised a $95M round (Mar 2025) at a $1.65B valuation, ~$291M total. Investors include Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Sumitomo.

  • Collaborative Robotics (Cobot)

    Industrial & Warehouse

    Practical autonomous mobile robots for work.

    Founded by former Amazon Robotics VP Brad Porter, Cobot builds autonomous mobile robots designed to work safely and intuitively alongside people in warehouses, hospitals, and industrial settings — prioritizing practical deployment over humanoid form factors.

    Founded
    2022
    HQ
    Santa Clara, California, USA
    Founders
    Brad Porter
    Products
    Proxie (mobile robot)
    Funding
    Raised a reported ~$100M Series B; investors include General Catalyst and Sequoia.

  • Bright Machines

    Industrial & Warehouse

    Software-defined microfactories.

    Bright Machines combines robotics, computer vision, and machine learning into 'Microfactories' — configurable, software-defined assembly cells that automate electronics manufacturing.

    Founded
    2018
    HQ
    San Francisco, California, USA
    Founders
    Amar Hanspal, Tzahi Rodrig
    Products
    Brightware (software), Microfactories
    Funding
    Raised a reported $400M+ across rounds; investors include BlackRock and Nvidia.

  • Standard Bots

    Industrial & Warehouse

    Affordable, AI-driven robotic arms.

    Standard Bots builds RO1, a six-axis robotic arm with built-in AI, aiming to make industrial automation affordable and easy to program for manufacturers and small businesses.

    Founded
    2017
    HQ
    Glen Cove, New York, USA
    Founders
    Evan Beard
    Products
    RO1 (robotic arm)
    Funding
    Backed by investors including General Catalyst.

  • Pickle Robot

    Industrial & Warehouse

    Autonomous truck and container unloading.

    Pickle Robot builds physical-AI systems that autonomously unload boxes from trucks and shipping containers, one of logistics' most physically demanding tasks.

    Founded
    2018
    HQ
    Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
    Founders
    AJ Meyer
    Products
    Pickle unload system
    Funding
    Raised a reported $50M+ Series B.

  • ANYbotics

    Legged & Mobile Robots

    ANYmal — autonomous inspection for heavy industry.

    An ETH Zurich spin-off, ANYbotics builds ANYmal, a four-legged robot for autonomous inspection of industrial plants, energy facilities, and offshore sites in hazardous environments.

    Founded
    2016
    HQ
    Zurich, Switzerland
    Founders
    Péter Fankhauser, Marco Hutter, and team
    Products
    ANYmal (quadruped)
    Funding
    Raised a reported $50M+ Series B.

  • Ghost Robotics

    Legged & Mobile Robots

    Rugged quadrupeds for defense and security.

    Ghost Robotics builds rugged quadrupedal 'Q-UGVs' (unmanned ground vehicles) used in defense, security, and inspection across harsh, unstructured terrain.

    Founded
    2015
    HQ
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
    Founders
    Gavin Kenneally, Avik De
    Products
    Vision 60 (Q-UGV)

  • Nvidia (Physical AI)

    Infrastructure & Platforms

    The compute and simulation stack powering physical AI.

    Nvidia provides much of the foundational infrastructure for physical AI and aims to be the 'Android of generalist robotics': Isaac for robot development, the Cosmos world foundation models (incl. Cosmos Reason) for synthetic data and reasoning, Isaac GR00T open humanoid foundation models (N1/N1.6/N1.7, with GR00T N2 in the works), the Newton physics engine, Omniverse for simulation, and Jetson AGX Thor edge computers for on-robot inference. Adopters include AGIBOT, LG, NEURA Robotics, and Humanoid.

    Founded
    1993
    HQ
    Santa Clara, California, USA
    Founders
    Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, Curtis Priem
    Products
    Isaac GR00T (N1.7 / N2), Cosmos (world foundation models), Newton (physics engine), Omniverse, Jetson AGX Thor
    Funding
    Publicly listed (NASDAQ: NVDA); also a major investor in physical-AI startups (Figure, Skild, Field AI, Wayve, Agility, and others).

  • Hugging Face (LeRobot)

    Infrastructure & Platforms

    Open-source robot learning and shared datasets.

    Hugging Face's LeRobot project provides open-source models, datasets, and tools for real-world robot learning, lowering the barrier to training and sharing physical-AI policies — and the company has moved into affordable open robot hardware.

    Founded
    2016
    HQ
    New York, New York, USA
    Founders
    Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf
    Products
    LeRobot, Open robot datasets & policies

Frequently asked questions

What is Physical AI?

Physical AI (also called embodied AI) is artificial intelligence that perceives, reasons about, and acts in the real, physical world through robots, vehicles, and machines. Unlike software-only AI such as chatbots, physical AI must handle perception, dexterity, balance, and real-time control under the laws of physics.

How is Physical AI different from generative AI?

Generative AI produces digital outputs — text, images, code — from data it has seen. Physical AI takes intelligence into the real world: it controls actuators and sensors, must respect physics and safety, and is judged by whether a task is actually completed in the environment, not just whether an answer looks correct.

What are the leading Physical AI companies?

Leading physical AI companies include humanoid robot makers (Figure AI, valued ~$39B; Tesla Optimus; 1X; Apptronik, ~$5B; Agility Robotics; Boston Dynamics, owned by Hyundai), robot foundation-model labs (Skild AI, ~$14B; Physical Intelligence, ~$5.6B; Field AI, ~$2B; World Labs), autonomous-driving companies (Waymo, Wayve at ~$8.6B, Nuro), warehouse and industrial robotics firms (Dexterity, Collaborative Robotics), and infrastructure providers (Nvidia). OpenCurious maintains a regularly updated, categorized directory of these companies.

How big is the Physical AI market?

Estimates vary widely by definition. Narrow 'physical AI' software/platform forecasts put the market around $1.5B in 2026 growing to ~$15B by 2032 (roughly 47% CAGR), while broader definitions that include hardware value it far higher. The humanoid robot segment alone is estimated at several billion dollars in 2026 and is projected to reach $150B+ by the mid-2030s. Venture and corporate investment into humanoid and embodied-AI startups has surged into the multiple billions of dollars per year, with Goldman Sachs projecting cumulative humanoid investment to surpass $50B by 2030.

What is a robot foundation model or vision-language-action (VLA) model?

A robot foundation model is a large AI model trained across many robots and tasks so it can generalize to new situations, much like a large language model does for text. Vision-language-action (VLA) models take in images and natural-language instructions and output robot actions — examples include Figure's Helix and Physical Intelligence's π0.

Why is Physical AI important now?

Advances in foundation models, simulation, low-cost hardware, and real-world robot data have converged, making general-purpose robots commercially plausible for the first time. Physical AI promises to address labor shortages in manufacturing, logistics, and elder care, and is widely viewed as the next major frontier after generative AI.

About this directory: OpenCurious curates this list of physical AI and embodied AI companies for researchers, founders, operators, and the simply curious. Funding figures and valuations are approximate and based on publicly reported information as of 2026-05-30; they change frequently. To suggest a company or correction, email hello@opencurious.com.